Noah and I paddled our way over the milky waters of Lake Champlain's South Bay one warm summer day toward a shallow cove. We were on the hunt for bowfin and longnose gar, and in that grey stained water, a weed-bed was calling our name about a half mile away. In other clearer parts of the lake we'd had success finding bass and bowfin around aquatic vegetation, so reason suggested that weedy area was a good place to start. As we closed in, we could tell it wasn't the sort of weed-bed we were used to in other parts of Champlain: the bulrush, the pickerel weed and it's lovely purple flowers, the elodea that the bowfin love to gracefully slide through. These weeded areas are always full of life, harboring little schools of shiners and young of the year sunfish. Dragon and damsel flies hover and perch on the vegetation that perks above the water's surface, and birds skim around chasing them. This was very different. It was a thick, homogenous, deep green mat with a lone, straight-as-an-arrow path cut through it. This was a water chestnut mat, and the path through it had been cut by the boat equivalent of a combine harvester- in fact we could see a few of these vessels working not far away. The state of New York was operating these to put a damper on the rapid spread of the chestnuts, which just so happen to be one of the most virulent invasive aquatic plants in the northeast right now. Water chestnuts take hold hard and fast, outcompeting native vegetation and creating a thick, green mono-culture, a mat that is impenetrable by kayak and not suitable for the fish and invertebrates that evolved to live in our waterways without it. The only way Noah and I could get into the cove filled with the water chestnuts was through the path created by the harvester, and within the clearer water and visibility of that open pathway was the only place we could find fish anyway. Even the most weedless of hollow-bodied frogs wasn't pulling a bowfin up through the lawn-like chestnut mat.
Water chestnuts, or, more accurately, water caltrop, are native to temperate portions of Eurasia and Africa. They emanate from a devilish looking seed, a dark, spiky thing an inch or two across that lodges in the muddy bottom... or your foot, if you step on one. A thin but fairly strong yellow stem protrudes from the seed and rises to the surface, where it blooms out into a concentrated radiating cluster of angular, deep green leaves. Water caltrop usually peak in July, when they form the thickest and most heinous of patches in the moderately shallow, slow water they prefer- around which time they produced the seeds that will be their next generation. From one year to the next, un-managed patches will grow rapidly. They're transplanted occasionally by boaters but also by large waterfowl. The species was introduced to the Northeast in 1877 in the Cambridge Botanical Garden. It took but a couple years for it to make it into the Charles River, and though the spread to the rest of the northeast was not direct or immediate, Trapa natans has since made its way around the Northeast and Mid Atlantic. The Hudson River and Lake Champlain in New York, Lake Nockamixon in Pennsylvania, Burke Lake in Virginia, and the Connecticut River through the heart of New England are just a tiny list of the places that have been invaded. The Connecticut River, though, is my home. I've watched the effects here first hand, and it has been astonishing... gut wrenching, even.
In 2016, Noah and I came across a small, round patch of water chestnuts in a shallow, muddy backwater. We knew that they would be a potential problem, but weren't fully knowledgeable yet. Eight years later, nearly to the day, I stood at the edge of the very same cove looking at the most visually striking example of an aquatic invasive mono culture I'd ever seen. One species of plant had taken over just about every inch of the cove, acres upon acres. Anyone who wanted to paddle to where we found that one little ten foot diameter patch eight years prior would have been in for a monumental effort, and a worthless one too. Where we'd caught bass in milfoil beds, had run ins with big pike on channel edges, and sight fished to tailing carp on open flats was now all just a lawn of water chestnuts, devoid of the diversity that had been there. Yes, some of that diversity had been detrimental non-natives too, but as bad as common carp can be for an ecosystem they don't belong in, the water caltrop are a bit worse, or at least more visibly impactful.
Not far away, my brother and I crept the Otter through a different cove, looking for a pair of sandhill cranes that I'd heard calling and then spotted a couple days prior. We were having no luck finding the birds, but had less trouble finding problematic plants.
Water chestnuts can be combatted with manual removal, something that isn't always productive on all aquatic invasive plants. By carefully pulling at the main stem of each plant, the whole thing- seed included -can be removed. The seed, that devilish looking little spikey thing, is the key: leave the seed in the muck and a new plant will just pop up. We carefully pulled as many plants as we could, rinsed the muck and living critters off of them as well as we could, and piled them into the boat. When there are hundreds of thousands of plants, this can be a very intimidating task. It's a dirty job, but someone's gotta do it.
Though Malachi and I put just a little dent in between the two of use, it was satisfying. The canoe sat a little lower in the water on the way back to the launch, and we had to haul the heavy masses as far from the water as we could in my Ranger net to get them somewhere they'd dry out and die without being washed back into the water by rain. This wasn't my first go, though it was my first year devoting time to the effort. But there are groups that have been attempting to hold back the invasion for a number of years now, brave volunteers at the front lines combatting invasives with hardened resolve.
One of those organizations is Connecticut River Conservancy. I talked with Rhea Drozdenko, who has been with the organization for two and a half years and coordinates water chestnut pulls and other aquatic invasive species efforts, about it. She worked at Wesleyan University before coming to CRC, and wanted to do something that combined her experience in advocacy and outreach with her love and passion for the Connecticut River. "Once something gets out of control its really hard to bring it back" Drozdenko said of the water caltrop situation. "The plant grows exponentially. One seed can produce ten or so rosettes and those rosettes can produce another ten seeds." Each summer, when the growing season occurs and those thick green mats of rosettes form on infested bodies of water throughout the state, Drozdenko and CRC set out with volunteers in two to combat the invasion and try to slow it down. On weekends they gather 20 to 30 volunteers at any of a number of sites to do manual removals. They generally start around 9:00a.m., paddle out, carefully pull as many plants as they can, then return to the launch to dispose of the water caltrop. "It's a pretty labor intensive process, but also a fun one, too," Drozdenko says, "you don't have to have any experience with it, we'll take anyone and show them the ropes of it. You don't even need your own boat, we'll have all the equipment that you need." And they're making some progress too! "There's one site we have which used to be a major infestation. The past two years we've seen 50 plants tops, so its not a site we bring volunteers anymore." Plenty of sites have a lot to pull though, and CRC disposes of the plants they remove in a couple of ways. For one site they have a contract with Blue Earth Compost, a company that specializes in turning food products and other organic waste into soil products. At other locations they just haul the plants high away from the water line to where they can decompose naturally without washing back into the river or pond. Manual pulling isn't the only focus, though. "Pulling is great, but prevention is much more important." says Drozdenko. It take much less effort and money to keep water caltrop from spreading from one watershed to the next than it does to get it out once it does establish. Now, some sites are to infested for manual pulls to be all that useful. "We're hoping to move into herbicidal management," she tells me, "the Army Corps of Engineers is doing a several year filed demonstration on hydrilla there, and anecdotally we could see that the herbicide for the hydrilla had an effect on the water chestnuts as well." All of this manual pulling, herbicide, and prevention does have cost though, and it is very important that the funding is available to organizations and agencies focused on combating aquatic invasive plants—enter the AIS Stamp.
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| A dragonfly rests on native marsh grass. Native vegetation plays a key roll for the ecosystem at large. |
In recent weeks I watched anglers and boaters getting rather angry about an additional fee they felt was suddenly being thrust upon them, with cries about a "new tax" ringing around the Facebook groups. It reminded me of times not long ago when CT added the trout stamp to counteract the fact that virtually every dollar of license sales was going to keeping the hatcheries going, despite the fact that plenty of license holders don't trout fish. I wanted the scoop, and Gwendolynn Flynn from CT DEEP's boating division provided it. "In 2019, our legislature added a five dollar fee to the vessel registration. Some people noticed, some people didn't notice." There's always a bit of a disconnect between the constituency and the legislature, because most people just flat out don't pay attention and think they don't have time to. Unfortunately that can lead to a bit of chaos. When some modifications were made to take the fee off the vessel registration, people noticed and they didn't like it. But it's vitally important to fund the fight against invasive plants as they stand to inhibit fisherman, boaters, and other recreators alike. "Prior to the AIS stamp in 2019, there was nothing, there was no state funding," says Wendy Flynn. But the new fees now fund groups that combat the problem both directly and indirectly. "That money is turned around into a competitive grant program, and non-profits and municipalities can apply for this money for control, research and education of aquatic invasive plants and cyanobacteria." Our dollars as resource users go directly back to benefitting the river that we love and use. In fact, the operations performed by Connecticut River Conservancy benefit from the AIS stamp and fees: "We're recipients of the AIS grant, that money goes to organizations like ourselves that do removal, management, and prevention work" Rhea Drozdenko told me.
I, for one, am glad that this problem is being taken seriously. I've watched these plants progress, not only with water caltrop but with hydrilla as well. Aquatic invasive plants pose a very real threat to native plants, fish, and insects. They fill in water that would otherwise be open, making recreating harder. And they take away the wild, native soul that our waterways have. We need to covet and protect the native plants that evolved in our ecosystems. They're invaluable, no dollar amount could be placed on their beauty and their ecological rolls. But these plants are snuffing them out. It takes a lot of work to put the bear back in its cage once it gets out. Thankfully, it seems to me the right people are on the job. And I'll be out there too, in my little canoe, pulling up wads of water chestnuts, getting muddy, doing my part... would you care to join me?
Helpful link:
Thanks to Rhea Drozdenko and Wendy Flynn for their help on this one.
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